“I never thought I would sit by her deathbed,” Luca said shortly. “This is one terrible sight I never thought I would see.”
“No,” his lordship conceded. “And a beautiful girl.”
Luca looked up, suddenly animated. “You should have known her. She was so much more than just beautiful. She was brave, she had tremendous courage and energy, and she loved the Lady Lucretili and would have laid down her life for her. She was as loyal as any comrade in arms. And she never shirked a challenge nor failed in anything she did.”
He broke off, remembering one night on a dark quayside when he had been most unhappy and she had come out into the darkness and challenged him to be a man and fight his grief. He had listened to her when no one else could have reached him. “She could fight with a sword,” he went on. “She could shoot a bow. She spoke many languages, she was a scholar, and as hardheaded as a philosopher; but once I saw her go up a ladder at midnight to rescue a kitten stuck on a roof.”
He fell silent, as the words he wanted to say went quiet in his mouth. Then he spoke them: “I love her,” he said quietly, and his own surprise at the words silenced him. “I have loved her for all this time and never known it.”
“Bit late now,” his lordship said callously.
“Yes,” Luca agreed. “I am a fool in this, too.”
He was silent, and the enormity of his confession filled the room.
“A man rarely knows his first love till he has lost her,” Lord Vargarten said, never having loved anyone. “So God bless her, anyway. Are you sure you won’t come to the castle for safety?”
Vehemently, Luca shook his head.
“Very well,” Lord Vargarten said indifferently. “Good night.”
He left the room. Luca heard his heavy tread on the stairs, heard the outer door bang shut, and then silence. The room, the inn, the town was filled with silence. Somewhere, an owl hooted.
Luca touched his hand to Ishraq’s cheek. She was even colder, as if her heart were slowly stopping and the warmth draining from her young body. Brother Peter came quietly into the room, followed by a priest carrying in a box of the sacred oils for the last rites that are given only to a dying person.
“Is it time?” Brother Peter asked quietly, his eyes on the beautiful girl, so still and so cold on the bed.
“It’s time,” Luca said, feeling his heart wrenched. “But I don’t think we should give her the last rites. She may not have wanted them.”
Brother Peter was profoundly shocked. “We can’t let her die unshriven.”
Luca raised his head. “Brother, I don’t really know what her faith was. I never saw her pray and I never heard her call on any god. I want to honor and respect her now, at her death, whatever her beliefs. I don’t think we should give her the last rites without her asking for them. I think we should just pray for her.”
“Was she a heretic?” the priest asked, alarmed. “She is dressed like a Mahometan.”
“She lived like a Christian woman in every way,” Brother Peter said, defending Ishraq now, despite his many criticisms of her in the past. “She wore the leggings and robe as an act of modesty when we were riding. But she was raised in a Christian home and she said that her father was a Christian, though she did not name him. We owe her the proper observances.”
“I think she was a seeker after truth,” Luca said. “I think she studied many texts. She was a philosopher. I don’t know that she had a single faith.”
“Then we must pray for her soul,” the priest said firmly. “For without a doubt she will go straight to hell. Everything that you say about her shows that she was born in sin and lived deep in sin.”
“She was always questioning,” Brother Peter said with a little smile.
“That’s very bad, especially in a woman,” the priest said. “That’s sin.”
Luca could not contain a choke of laughter at the thought of what his funny, indomitable friend would say to that. “Yes,” he said, giving up trying to explain that he thought Ishraq was not a sinner but a woman who was finding her own way in a world that was not generous to young women. The three men knelt beside the girl’s bed and prayed until the room grew shadowy and night fell on the quiet town.
“And so, I will leave you,” the priest said, crossing himself. “And may God have mercy upon her soul. She can be buried tomorrow. She’ll have to be buried on the wrong side of the churchyard wall, outside sanctified ground, but we can say prayers over her grave.”
Luca nodded, not trusting his voice.
“I’ll go to pray at the church,” Brother Peter said quietly. “Will you eat something? Come with me?”
“I’ll wait here. There must be some reason for this; there must be some explanation. I’ll sit with her; perhaps I will be able to understand what has happened. I wish we knew . . . I wish we knew so much. We are like fools blundering about in darkness and now we have lost Ishraq. I’ll stay here tonight. I don’t want her to . . . to—” He broke off. Brother Peter realized that the young man could not say the words “die alone.”
“Stay with her till the end,” Brother Peter agreed. “I will pray for her soul.” He went quietly from the room.
In the dappled, moonlit forest, Freize waited until he was sure that the dancers were all asleep. Several times he started to creep toward them and then froze when one turned and cried out in their sleep, or another, chilled into wakefulness by the night dew, rose up and took a few steps of dance to warm up, and then lay down again.
He was about to take the risk of approaching Isolde and trying to wake her, even though she was beside the landlady and the fiddler, when he saw something moving on the far side of the clearing. Something crept behind a tree, a bush moved, and then, crawling along the ground like a legless beast, he saw the strange Being worming his way silently across the open ground of the glade.
Freize stayed still and watched, wondering what the creature was doing, and if he would disturb the dancers, perhaps causing such a diversion that Freize could run in, pull Isolde to her feet, and get her away during the confusion. But, as the young man watched, he saw, with increasing fear, that Isolde seemed to be the goal of this stealthy progress. The Being was clearly snaking his way toward her, where she lay partly covered by the fiddler’s cape, next to the sleeping bulk of the landlady.
Anxiously, Freize rose up, thinking that he should protect Isolde from this new danger, but then he thought that this might be a rescue attempt, and he should wait and see if it was successful. So far, the Being had wormed his way across the open ground unobserved, and was now creeping up on the sleeping trio.
The Being reached Isolde’s side and reared up to his knees. In the uncertain light from the moon, he seemed taller than he had been just hours earlier and, as Freize watched, he put his hands under the sleeping girl’s shoulders and knees. Drawing her away from the cape, he picked her up without any effort. Clearly, he was much stronger than any ordinary man, for, holding the sleeping girl in his arms, he rose easily to his feet and started to take big, silent steps backward across the clearing, his moon face watchfully turned toward the fiddler, his eyes on the sleeping dancers.
Isolde did not even stir as, without making a sound, the Being melted into the darkness of the forest. Unable to believe his luck, Freize watched as he carried the sleeping girl back to the little track that ran through the forest. “He’s done it!” Freize whispered to himself, quietly creeping through the woods after them. “God bless him, for he has her safe. I could not have lifted her and carried her in silence, but the creature has done it.”
The Being had reached the track that led back to the village and—with the girl still sleeping in his arms—he turned and started to walk, not toward Freize and safety, but north, farther and farther away from Mauthausen.
“No, no, that won’t do!” Freize muttered under his breath. “You’re going the wrong way, my friend!” He did not dare to shout aloud, and he did not dare to run down the bare road, which was brilliantly lit by
moonlight, so, keeping his eyes all the time on the Being and the girl he carried so easily in his arms, Freize ran through the woods, parallel to the track, keeping under the canopy of the trees, skirting the thin bushes, jumping fallen boughs, ducking under the lower branches, desperately trying to go faster so that he could intercept the Being and take Isolde from him.
As he ran, he racked his brains as to what he might do if the Being would not hand over the girl. He was bigger, still gaining height and strength at an unbelievable rate, and what he intended, Freize did not know. Was he a friend, saving Isolde, or an enemy capturing her and taking her into worse danger?
“The little lord should be here!” Freize exclaimed to himself. “For here is a strange and terrible thing, this being the very sort of thing he likes to see, a worthy topic for his inquiry, and we are a fair way to getting well acquainted. Indeed, to my mind, he’s somewhat overfamiliar. There is my lady in his arms, and him not even introduced, let alone friendly.”
Freize struggled his way through the woods, stumbling on the rough ground, losing his footing in the darkness as clouds gathered over the moon. He realized that unless the Being slowed up or stopped of his own free will, Freize would never overtake, let alone challenge him. Freize’s breath was coming in painful gasps as he stumbled onto the track behind the Being, who was taking long, easy strides down the shadowy road.
“Hi!” Freize tried to shout, but he was breathless and did not dare make a noise. He put his head down, and went at a panting run after them both.
The Being was traveling at remarkable speed—he did not seem to feel the stones under his big, bare feet, nor the weight of Isolde in his arms. Freize felt a rising sense of terrible panic. Clearly, the Being had not rescued Isolde at all, but captured her, and was taking her to some secret place, his own lair, and Freize was dropping behind a foot, a yard, at every step. Soon the monster and the sleeping girl would be far away on the moonlit road, and out of sight.
“Hi!” Freize panted. “Wait up! You must wait!”
The Being turned his huge face and, with a chill of fear, Freize saw his recognition, and a slow smile spread across his face. The Being nodded with gruesome encouragement, as if inviting Freize to chase him, and then turned away and strode on, faster.
For the long hours of the night Luca knelt by the bed, seeing the slatted light from the shutters slowly move across the boards of the floor as the moon traveled across the night sky. Sometimes he held Ishraq’s hand and felt for the faint, dying flutter of her pulse; he heard the chiming of the hours of the liturgy from the monastery outside the town. It reminded him of when he had been a boy and had to get up through the night every four hours to attend the church services. He thought that he would tell Ishraq about the coldness of the winter nights in the monastery and how Freize would sneak hot bread loaves that had been baked for the senior monks into his cold hands at choir practice, and then he realized that he would never tell Ishraq anything again.
He rose up once or twice and paced about the room, looking through the little horn window at the orchard below, at the stable yard beyond, at the jumble of roofs and the dark sky above them. He was desperately anxious about Isolde: where she was sleeping, and if she and Freize were even now safe together and hurrying back to the town. He was afraid that Isolde might arrive only in time to bury her dearest friend, a bitter ending to a lifelong love and adventure. He did not know how he was going to tell Isolde that Ishraq had died while she was gone; he did not know how he would speak of her without showing his sudden realization that he loved her passionately. He thought that he had managed to fall in love with both girls, and declare himself to one, the act of a fool. To him, a novice priest, it was worse than folly, it was sin—a double sin.
He knelt at the side of Ishraq’s bed and prayed for forgiveness for his own selfish and sinful confusion. But he kept returning to the thought that surely no young man could have known the two of them, traveled with them, laughed with them, challenged by their cleverness and courage, and not love them? Isolde, the beautiful lady of the castle like a heroine from a romance, and Ishraq, a girl so powerful in her character and her decisions, so passionately real.
It grew colder toward dawn and Luca could feel the chill creeping from Ishraq’s pale face, down her neck, into the core of her being. Her fingernails were turning blue, and he could no longer feel her faint pulse. He knew then that it could not be long, and he rested his forehead against her cold hand and prayed for the girl that he now knew he loved and for her immortal soul.
On the darkened road, stumbling all the time on the rough ground, Freize was falling farther and farther behind the strange creature and Isolde. As the sky slowly lightened and he realized that they had been hurrying along the road all night, he could see that Isolde was no longer being carried, but was at the Being’s side, her hand grasped in his great palm, his other hand behind her back, pushing her forward. She seemed to be resisting him, as if her feet were dancing her away from him, and then he pulled her back.
Freize, horrified at the sight of Isolde being dragged against her will by a Being who now towered over her, drove himself onward, faster and faster, but still he could not close the gap between them. Suddenly, from the road behind them, there was a skirl of sound. At once, the Being hesitated, and stopped, slowly turning his big head. Freize flung himself headlong into a bush at the side of the road, before the dark, staring eyes could see him, still following, and looked fearfully back down the road.
There was the fiddler, dancing along as fresh as a youth, and straggling out on the road a good half-mile behind him were the dancers, following the sound of the music as if against their own will, drawn by the haunting swirl of the fiddle, stumbling in the half-light of a cold dawn with the sliver of a white moon going down in the sky.
Freize had no doubt that the fiddler was following Isolde, trying to recapture her and win her back to the dancers. He looked up the road and saw her twisting and turning in the grip of the Being, as if she were trying to get away, and then, even more terribly, as if she were urging him to dance too, to dance as her partner. As he watched, one fist against his mouth to choke back his horrified shout, she took the Being’s hand and turned under it, as pretty as a lady in a great hall, and then turned back the other way and curtsied to it. The Being took both her hands as if they were going to skip together in a country dance; but, instead of dancing with her, he urged her quickly along the road, away from the fiddler and away from the dancers.
Trapped between the Being, whose desires and actions he did not understand, and the dancers led by the implacable fiddler, Freize shrank back deeper into the forest and tried to make his way toward Isolde through the trees, without breaking cover. Behind him he could hear the haunting sound of the music coming steadily closer, and slowly he felt his own feet failing him. He crammed his mufflers in his ears, but they could not save him. He could hear the irresistible jig and now he was no longer running—his feet were pacing in time to the music. He knew it was only a matter of time before he started to dance and there would be no one to rescue Isolde, and no one to even witness that he himself was lost.
He tightened the cloth round his chin so that the plugs in his ears fitted more snugly, but he could still hear the penetrating melody of the fiddle and now the tambourine started a swift, insistent patter of sound that spoke of a world of people dancing for joy, the happiness of a circle dance, of a light hand on a young man’s shoulder, of a man’s gentle touch on a girl’s waist, of the delight of moving as one. Freize’s running steps stumbled as he started to pace in time to the music, and then helplessly, despite himself, he started to dance.
Some time at about five in the morning, as the dawn sky grew pale and silver, Ishraq stopped breathing. Luca had been dozing in the chair at the side of her bed and, though she only went from near-silent tiny breaths to complete silence, he immediately woke. “Ishraq!” He scrambled to his knees beside the bed. “Ishraq, don’t go! Don’t leave me!”
/> He put his ear to her nose: there was not even the tiniest whisper of a breath. He put his ear to her cool chest: there was no heartbeat. For a moment he was frozen by dread in the presence of death. Luca was a young man living in dangerous times—he had seen death many times before—but he had not lost a friend, a beautiful young woman at the very height of her youth and beauty, someone he thought was certain to survive all sorts of dangers, someone he believed was destined for great things. He had seen her swim in a flood; he had seen her shoot an arrow from a longbow; he had seen her laugh for sheer joy; he had seen her face down an Ottoman slaver and smile without fear before a man with a handgun; but he had never thought he would see her die.
He gave a little inarticulate growl of pain and refusal. “Don’t go!” he said again, knowing that she could no longer hear him. “Don’t go! Don’t go!”
He climbed on the bed beside her and put his arms round her, as if he would love her now, though he had never done so in life. He put his cheek to her cold cheek, he whispered in her ear, he slid his arm under her shoulders and pulled her toward him, wrapping himself round her as if he would be her lover despite death.
“Ishraq!” he whispered. “Don’t leave me.”
He felt the tiniest whisper of breath on his cheek almost like an answer; but he was holding her so tightly, he thought it might be his own passionate words.
Then he felt her move, slightly, hardly at all, it was only the recommencing of the rise and fall of her chest with a little breath. He checked himself at once, thinking that he had crushed the air out of her with his weight and that this was her dying breath, but then Luca felt the strangest and most beautiful sensation—he felt her inhale. He had moved her, pressing down on her frame, and forced her to take a tiny breath, and now she was taking another.